Can you believe she—
I’ve never known her to—
That isn’t the Layla—
But there was no part of her that cared.
“Jamie,” she said, and waited until he met her eyes to speak again. “Get a stronger stomach, and go take care of your family.”
Then, she finally turned and ran.
Chapter Thirty-One
She caught up to him on her first try, no backtracking necessary.
Around a curve, a half block until the hotel, and the streets of the Marais were still quiet, so it sounded extra loud when she called out to him, the black line of his body hunched in such a specific way, aleave me aloneway.
But he did stop when he heard her.
He turned and looked at her across the expanse of street, and she thought,Don’t leave. If you leave now, like this, that’ll be the end of it with us.
She knew that deep down.
A knowing more certain, maybe, from having just ended it—really, truly, ended what was left of it—with Jamie.
Griffin started walking toward her.
They met in the middle, in the center of the narrow street, neither of them, apparently, worried about traffic passing through. On either side of them, the stone sidewalks were lined with those hip-height, painted-black guard stones, a relic from another time, like the buildings that rose up to enclose them—cream and tanand gray-white with age, the most gorgeous, showy neutrality. Above were balconies, trailing ivies, lanterns spaced evenly and hanging elegantly from black wrought iron brackets, and, at the very, very top of it all, a curving river of bright blue morning light.
She thought,This would be the place. This would be the place to tell someone you love them.
Paris. Je t’aime.
No translation needed.
But something else she knew deep down was that she would not be telling him that today.
Not in any language.
And she knew that he would not be telling her, either.
“He wasn’t right,” she said, which—what withJe t’aimeon her mind—certainly felt too blunt for this perfect, poetic street. But it was still important, so she kept going. “What Fitz said. He was not right.”
You do not burn everything to the ground, part of her wanted to say, but she could not bring herself to voice even a contradictory echo of Fitz’s vitriol. Could not bring herself to sayburnin Griffin’s presence.
He was looking at her with such brutal, bleak sadness: his gaze moving over her face as if he was memorizing her, his mouth set as if it helped him concentrate. It was so overwhelming that she dropped her eyes, desperate to think of something,anythingto say that would make him forget about all the ugliness Fitz had aimed his way.
Because that ugliness, she suspected, was about to suck every scrap of beauty out of what she and Griffin had found here together in Paris.
“I know that,” he said finally, surprising her, and she snapped her eyes up to his.
She probably looked ten kinds of hopeful.Too hopeful.And she thought, maybe—maybe—she saw a ghost of that Versailles quirk.
“I think I’m more family to Michael than Fitz has maybe ever been,” he added.
“I think so, too,” she said, surprised to hear tears gathering in her voice. Relief and pride and happiness for him. Too mucht’aimefor her to acknowledge.
But if he knew this—if he knew that it had been good to tell Emily, that he had done right by Michael, that he was in fact more family than Fitz ever was, then maybe, for the two of them—for Griff and Layla, Layla who needed someone who understood family in exactly this way, there was a chance. A chance for them to—
